Black Ops 2 may have a villain with all of the weapons and most of the beards, but that doesn’t mean we can just forget about the game’s real-life nemesis – who also has all of the weapons and most of the beards. I speak, of course, about Medal of Honor: Warfighter, which would also like to show you its fanciest new war-waging wares. This time, though, story’s taking a backseat in favor of multiplayer, and somewhere, a koala version of Smokey Bear weeps as these nationalism-powered soldier types welcome each other to the jungle by blowing it up. Witness the environmentally-unfriendly carnage after the break.

In between all the THOOMS, RATTATTATTATATAAs, and POWBIFFs, I did manage to catch a couple interesting things. For one, drones appear to officially be part of multiplayer – though I don’t honestly know if players can control them or not. Also, a few things look nicely destructible thanks to a bit of help from the Hulk-like hand of Frostbite 2. Admittedly, it was mostly the usual suspects – wood splintering, vehicles hitting the skids, etc – but a bridge got reduced to rubble, so that was neat. Trees, meanwhile, barely budged – which is either disappointing or an encouraging sign of nature’s resilience in the face of humanity’s callous deeds.

Apparently, all of this is supposed to play into a, er, FIFA-inspired national-pride-based metagame. So the point is to root for the home team and try to further its cause in the – and here’s a phrase that never would’ve flown even 15 years ago – feel-good war of the century. I’m not really sure how I feel about that, but I also haven’t gotten to play it, so no verdict for now. Anyway, THOOM, BLAM, KER-WHAMZOTT. Discuss.

As a long-time supporter of recycling multiplayer FPS franchises I am shocked and appalled by the amount of innovation this game brings to the table. Also, what is it with all the colours? This game needs more brown. Jesus Airstrike Christ.

I never really understood why people thought this was the “realism element” most crucial to the game. It makes you value your life I suppose, but players who value their lives end up playing for the KDR roughly the same as they do in a respawn game. It also still breaks that wall between realism and game just as badly.

You know the other team has one life and objectives, the other team knows it has one life and objectives. The logical thing to do is not to attack but choose a great place to camp and shoot people who walk by. There is no real incentive to walk by without the game. Thus a timer is created to defeat this so that the team with attack objectives….must attack. Of course that would be stupid because as a game, you have 3-4 routes and going for the objective just lets the other guy have a defensive holdout and kill you. So people rove about looking for people where they know people will be first trying to rack up kills. Using the objective is almost always last minute option to draw out a hiding enemy. You would need swat style tactics to actually take on that kind of situation from the very start (thus why these games only work in competition and even seldom then focus on the objective and not killing the most people per spawn).

Thus, what it boils down to is a lot of people trying to out twitch shoot each other at the same spots on the same maps over and over and over and over. Not that different than respawning really… the difference here is that you have to wait for every individual of your team to die before you “respawn” with the enemies back in predictable locations for you.

How incredibly realistic???? Seems weird that if my 10 man team was reduced to 1 and I was still facing 7… I would try to kill all of them still instead of running away?

Bleh. Still clearly a reflection of reality being gamified. You just prefer short round based game types with predictable/limited starts instead of long rounds with respawns.

Search & Destroy available in most CoD titles (at least MW1/2/3, Black Ops – probably WaW) says hello. It is a popular mode as well. You only respawn when a round ends.

Alternatively you could try out their implementations of CTF or Sabotage which implement respawn timers, or Headquarters where if your team captures the objective, you don’t respawn until after a new objective appears.

“I did manage to catch a couple interesting things. For one, drones appear to officially be part of multiplayer”
Do you mean aerial drones like used for the UAVs in MW1/2/3/BlackOps/WaW?
MW2/3 have controllable aerial drones as well, and MW3 has a controllable land drone also – and a placeable remotely controlled sentry turret as well.